From Bertie Bowl to begging bowl — the GAA is at it again

NOW that the Government has agreed to provide money to upgrade Lansdowne Road, the GAA is looking for another €38 million so that it won’t be “disadvantaged”. If there were gold medals for arrogant and contemptible beggars in this Olympic year, some of the GAA would be odds-on certainties.

In the 1994 Budget, the Government announced £5m for the GAA to offset their rebuilding costs at Croke Park. The gesture attracted attention, but not much support. The GAA people would have us believe that this is because the media is hostile to them, and they are probably right.

The £5m was small in relation to the amount that would be generated in tax from the construction work at Croke Park.

"There are no strings attached to the allocation as of yet," explained Liam Aylward, the Minister of State for Sport at the time. He went on to suggest the possibility of increased funding in order to turn Croke Park into a kind of national stadium in which some soccer internationals might be played.

Peter Quinn, the president of the GAA at the time, was particularly dismissive of the idea when he was interviewed on RTÉ News on the day after the Budget.

"There is absolutely no possibility of the GAA changing its position," he declared.

"We do have major issues in relation to making Croke Park available for soccer."

The GAA had already raised £12m itself and he said that "a disproportionate part of that" was "collected" from the Six Counties. He was apparently insinuating that the whole soccer thing was somehow linked with partition.

"In terms of hyping issues like the playing of soccer in Croke Park," he said, "there are far too many people who ignore the reality of the fact that this is a divided island and I think that we are in a position that we have to be very careful not to accentuate division any further on that basis."

Instead, they are preserving the divisions. The GAA and the Catholic Church have been the greatest promoters of partition within the 26 Counties. The GAA has not been prepared to stand up to that bigoted minority from Northern Ireland within the organisation. For years they were looking for their human rights, but now what they seek is revenge, and no decent person should be a party to those machinations. Only a fool would think one side causes all the grave problems of Northern Ireland. The thugs and bigots are on both sides.

Partition may have been decried here for decades, but we were a partitionist state. We ruled out the use of force to end partition, but let almost half a century go by before anyone even tried persuasion.

Politicians on all sides of the Dáil exploited the partition issue for their own selfish ends. Eamon de Valera secretly called on the Dáil to recognise the need to accept partition in August 1921, and he spent the rest of his life pretending that the partition issue had been his main concern throughout his political career.

Fine Gael tried to upstage him on the issue. At one point they even called themselves the United Ireland Party, yet they fostered a form of sectarian Catholic rule that was anathema to any self-respecting person of any other religion.

Our so-called republicans betrayed the republic by handing the country over to a narrow-minded clique in the hierarchy that had no respect for anyone's rights other than their own. By the 1950s hypocrisy ruled here, and the country was backward. While the rest of the world enjoyed boom times, we suffered a depression.

The GAA was very much to the fore in sporting terms, and it was also in the forefront of exhibiting our fawning hypocrisy. Our leaders used to parade out in the centre of Croke Park to get on one knee and kiss some bishop's ring. They might as well have been kissing his posterior. And then the gathering would burst into Faith of Our Fathers.

Of course, they did not realise the kind of spectacle they were making of us in the eyes of outsiders.

Somehow, I don't think they appreciated either the irony of using the song written by Frederick W Faber, an Englishman. I bet you never heard the third verse in Croke Park:

"Faith of our fathers! Mary's prayers

Shall win our country back to thee;

And through the truth that comes from God,

England shall then indeed be free.

Faith of our fathers, holy faith!

We would be true to thee till death."

SOME idiot recently tried to justify the GAA's Rule 42 on the grounds that the British have never apologised for the first Bloody Sunday in 1920.

What do the British have to do with Irish rugby or soccer teams playing in Croke Park? The GAA have every right to use Croke Park as they see fit to welcome rock bands and American football teams and keep out other so-called "foreign games". Nobody expects the GAA to give up Croke Park when it is needed for a Gaelic football or hurling games, but it plays few games there at times that other codes might desire to use it. Hence there should no difficulty providing Croke Park for soccer internationals, if only as a money-raising venture for itself, or a money-saving gesture towards a Government that helped it so generously.

Some of the GAA insist that they cannot accept any money from the Government unless there are no strings attached. These arrogant beggars refuse to help themselves but expect everybody else to help them on their conditions only.

Bertie Ahern went out on a limb to help the GAA. In a sense he was behaving like the Cumann na nGaedheal leaders of the 1920s when they promised to pay the British around £100m in land annuities without the authority of the Dáil.

Eamon de Valera repudiated that agreement.

"No minister can assign national property away by his own signature," he declared.

Yet in 2001 Bertie Ahern promised to give the GAA money, without even discussing it with his Cabinet. The Tánaiste publicly indicated that she was unaware of the offer.

"For a small country we need better sports facilities but it should be on a more shared basis," the Taoiseach explained.

Mary Harney seemed to be singing from the same hymn sheet.

"Any funding of this kind, if it were to be given to the GAA, would have to be on the basis that the facilities were made available to other organisations," she declared.

They were right, but if the Taoiseach thought his generous offer was going to sway the GAA congress to rescind Rule 42, he was deluding himself. The GAA took the money and essentially kicked him and the taxpayers in the teeth.

Croke Park is a magnificent asset that can earn money for the GAA. If the organisation is not prepared to earn for itself, it deserves no public help. That would be a sense of charity gone mad. Unless they are prepared to help themselves, they deserve only contempt, and they will deserve it in abundance.